Author: Tina Gasperson
Orlando is a native Venezuelan who now lives in Italy. He has an extensive background in Unix and has been using Linux since 1995, when he discovered Slackware. Having enjoyed the benefits of quality documentation and training materials available for Unix, it was his dream to provide the same kind of resources for beginning Linux users. He wants to give FTLinuxCourse away to show people what his consulting company, Future Technologies, Inc., is capable of, and because he believes that by giving it away, more people will purchase the next iteration of the course and it will become more popular as a legitimate Linux training course, especially in colleges and universities.
Orlando wrote FTLinuxCourse in Italian, and later translated it himself to English and Spanish. “I contracted with a company to translate it to French and German,” he says. There are future plans to provide versions in Japanese and Portuguese.
Orlando wants users to know that although the course was originally written with Caldera OpenLinux in mind, it has been updated to include specific information about Red Hat, SUSE, and LinuxPPC. New series include courses for webmasters, X Windows, systems integrators, and system administrators.
Future Technologies has also released its own Linux distribution, FTOSX, and Orlando says the next version of the FTLinuxCourse will be specific to it. “We are working on the FTOSBuilder, a program to produce GNU/Linux based operating systems,” he adds.
Orlando plans to create an FTLinuxCourse mailing list, “so we can create a community around this and other products.” He doesn’t know exactly how many people have downloaded the course so far, but “the log file for FTLinuxCourse.com [tripled] its size in one day, [with] something like 127,000 accesses for the first day.”
